Economics of a 2D Adventure

Thanks to The Grumpy Gamer (Ron Gilbert of Monkey Island fame), for his excellent look at The Economics of 2D Adventure Games. "First, this is only a thought experiment. This is not something I am planning on doing, or even have a huge interest in doing, so please don't feed the rumor mills. Second, this article contains gory and gruesome details about the games business and, in particular, marketing and distribution. If you'd rather remain blissfully oblivious to the horrors of what goes on behind the scenes, this is the place to stop reading. If you're one of those people that can't help but stare at a car accident, read on."

Comments

Re:The first thing I noticed

[TwistedSquare]

Though they did say they would be using an existing engine, which should reduce the amount of testing needed by quite a bit to my mind.

Thought Experiments and Current Experience.

[Musenik]

First, Ron Gilbert deserves a lot praise for his explanation of the lost way of 2D games. I worked three years for Sierra Online, porting 10 titles to the Macintosh. He's right on. More recently, I've been working on a 2D adventure game that should go gold, next week.

Thank Mr. Gilbert for observing that there are many other routes than his traditional approach. But this is the computer game industry, and tradition applies mostly to last week. The route we've taken is to design a game specifically for the women segment of the downloadable audience. They are largely unfamiliar with adventure games. For that reason, we hope to stand out among the billion puzzle games.

Building 'The Witch's Yarn' cost, out of pocket, $10,000, including legal fees for the distribution agreement. That does not cover the principal developer's salary, but it did pay for the art, animation, proofreading, testing, sound engineering, and music licenses. Guerrilla developers can make real products (mac, pc, linux simultaenous) on real tight budgets. (the trick was to build a text adventure game that looks like a 2D adventure game - think comix)

Now, $10,000 is all one should spend to build a game for the downloadable market. The biggest game portals charge the most money to sell your game, even more than the retail channel! Fortunately, you don't have manufacturing costs. A good selling game, might earn a developer $100,000, but less than $50,000 is more likely.

Of course, who knows what'll be true next week.

Re:I think he should rethink the "PC Game only" pa

[Anonymous Coward]

Since I've had to deal with some of these issues, being a game developer myself..

Remember, one of his major reasons for not going on the console was that to do a console title, the console maker gets a big cut of the profit pie, on top of the cut already being taken by your publisher, which is taken no matter if you're distributing on the PC or on a console.

Also, it is harder to develop/debug for consoles than on the PC, and you'll have to invest in development hardware (XBox dev kits, Playstation 2 Test kits and Tools, etc), which are EXPENSIVE.